


and i am wanting

by maplemood



Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-01
Updated: 2020-02-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:27:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22512472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: “Yen,” he says, exasperated and puzzled in equal measure (even drunk, she usually isn’t so maudlin), “I don’t give a dog’s arse whether you had a walleye or hangnails.”“I don’t care what you think. And that’s not what I meant.”
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 20
Kudos: 124





	and i am wanting

**Author's Note:**

> Set some time between "Bottled Appetites" and "Rare Species."

Once upon a time—and all old, unfinished stories start with  _ once upon a time _ , there’s no helping that—there was an ugly girl who, in some ways more than others, grew into an ugly woman. That is to say, a sorceress. And this sorceress, for all her hard-won grace, wealth, and power, wanted what is harder still to get and hardest of all to hold on to, what, strictly speaking, can’t be gotten, only given. In a word, love.

Or perhaps not; perhaps love is the wrong word altogether. After all, this sorceress was a skilled one, and most skilled sorceress are rather more interested in regard, admiration, even envy, than in love. Love is slippery in all its forms. It can’t be depended on. The sorceress wanted what could be depended on and built on, and what could be excavated down to its very heart. Something—and, for all her skill, all her years of learning, the sorceress was never quite certain what—she might possess utterly, that she might be possessed in turn.

So: the very opposite of something simple. But, put yet another way, it might boil down to words quite simple indeed.

Put another way, Yennefer of Vengerberg wants  _ everything. _

* * *

Like many ugly young girls destined to be sold away from their families for less than the price of a prize pig—and they are many more than you would wish to believe—Yennefer dreamed of the man who would someday come to rescue her.

It was always a man, and always a handsome one. When she was little she imagined him tow-headed and freckled, like the farmers’ boys she spied on through chinks in the gapped walls of the barn. When her father beat her, and afterwards Yennefer’s mother sent her to the barn for the night with nothing but a whispered apology, she imagined one of those boys, an especially tall one or an especially sweet-faced one, smoothing ointment over the welts on her back, laying his hands on her crooked shoulders. She hadn’t been touched there by anyone but her father in years, and she ached for another kind of touch, steady and gentle. 

As Yennefer grew older, and the farmers’ boys, even the sweet-faced ones, grew less likely to tolerate her spying, the man sprouted thick dark hair and clear blue eyes, fingers calloused from work but clean and skillful. By the time she came to accept there was no such man in the whole of Vengerberg, much less such a man willing to pass through Vengerberg and take notice of a pig keeper’s hunchbacked daughter, it was too late. His image was fixed in Yennefer’s mind. A solid outline, at least—the hair might change, the eyes, even the fingers, but there’d been a firmness to him from the beginning. Strengths hidden and not, a willingness to do what others wouldn’t.

Now, whenever she is suffering from insomnia or boredom—or both—Yennefer calls up memories of the men she’s known since then. In theory, any will do, though in practice she sticks with either Istredd or Geralt, the only two she’s known long enough to build something of a rapport with. Idly, from her bed in an inn, a palace, an alderman’s house, Yennefer measures them against the old ideal. She’s had plenty of time to add to the bare outlines, not that it matters, to shape and refine.

Take Geralt. He  _ will _ do his best to define “rapport” exclusively in terms of grunts, sighs, and glares, with her far less than most others, Yennefer knows. So: sparkling conversationalist? When it suits him.

Personal cleanliness? Naught.

Bravery? Strength? Steadfastness? All present and accounted for, up to a point.

He always did fit the outlines. Uncomfortably so, yet he fits them. It’s almost a pity Yennefer can’t love him the way she would have as a girl, openly, devotedly, without reservation. He’d have been a sight to behold then. A witcher of Kaer Morhen, come to sweep the pig keeper’s daughter off her feet! Their story would have been told for years after she’d been laid, dead and crooked, in the dirt, and the witcher had ridden on his way.

_ Almost _ a pity—it’s been years since Yennefer cared to share her story with anyone for more than a scattering of days, each carefully parceled out. Longer still since she stopped hoping for a fairy tale knight to bear her out of reach of all her troubles, and Geralt is no knight. His stories are no fairy tales. They’re better-known than hers, and more than likely, were the two to twine together too long, her stories would be choked off.

Yennefer won’t be possessed by him. She’s gained too much—she won’t go back.

Yet.

She won’t stop herself wanting him. And this is just an exercise, a little game. A foolish way to pass the night.

* * *

“Piglet.” She’d been confined to the infirmary for some hours, perhaps some days, already; Yennefer remembers Tissaia’s cool fingers on her bandaged wrists and clammy forehead and half-suspects they were a dream. Tissaia hadn’t been particularly motherly yet. Yennefer just ached for a mother. “You thought the wanting would end, did you?”

“Go away.” Her mind was cloudy, her throat sludged. Tissaia’s fingers were less a comfort than a poking, prodding judgement, and Yennefer had borne all the judgement she was willing to bear. “Leave me—”

“It would have kept you. Tethered you here, no doubt. Such energy…perhaps that would have been of more use to us.” Her touch skimmed off Yennefer’s temple. “No matter.”

“I want—”

“You see? It’ll never leave you, girl. It will possess you always. Now then. Get up and get better. You have much to learn.”

* * *

“Tell me what you want,” he roared amid the storm of wild magic and Yennefer’s own groaning bones, the desire possessing her far harder than a djinn ever could and with no clear target, not truly—a baby, a body healed and whole, once those were hers she would covet something else, always, she knew then as she knows now—

“I want everything!” As if Geralt would be the one to give everything to her.

* * *

“I’m ugly,” Yennefer tells him, sunk in the depths of the too-small, no doubt flea-infested bed in the barely-staffed cowpat of an inn Geralt has deemed sufficient shelter for the night. Her cheek pressed to the hollow of his shoulder, she smells both his sweat and his horse’s. Roach. Gods, what a name for a pretty bay mare—Yennefer would expect no less from a witcher, but there are times when this one lacks even a hint of charm. 

Geralt grunts discontentedly—unless that was a belch. They’ve both drunk too much already tonight. “Yen,” he says, exasperated and puzzled in equal measure (even drunk, she usually isn’t so maudlin), “I don’t give a dog’s arse whether you had a walleye or hangnails.”

“I don’t care what you think. And that’s not what I meant.”

He shifts beneath her. Yennefer sighs as Geralt heaves himself upright on one arm. She’s annoyed enough, suddenly, to turn away from him; she would if their bed weren’t much smaller than advertised and more than half-occupied by Geralt’s bulk. If she so much as twitches she might topple over the edge. A bruised tailbone, Yennefer thinks nastily, might be enough to impose on him for a few days, turn his life into a petty hell. Then again, even she isn’t petty enough to suffer through witcher doctoring.

Instead, she meets his eyes, glaring. Goat’s eyes, Yennefer’s heard them called, cat’s eyes by those more kind. Devil’s eyes. “It’s inside me,” she snaps. “It’s always been—don’t think it’s something you can fix.”

Geralt’s either in an obliging mood or drunker than she realized. He crooks one finger to comb the spill of Yennefer’s dark hair back from her shoulder, the once-mishappen shoulder that still aches, though he can’t know that, she’s never told him, and, bending down, presses his lips to the hollow of that shoulder like she pressed her cheek to his.

* * *

That is to say, a sorceress.

Ugly girls often make for sorceresses. In fact, there are those who say only ugly girls have earned themselves the right, and only if they are born ugly enough and unwanted enough. This is not exactly true. It’s also far from wrong.

* * *

“Tell me,” he says after that odd gesture, tender in a way he’s not often been with her and that, Yennefer senses, he’s ill at ease with. Maybe, though, she’s only projecting; there’s plenty of unease brooding in her own gut.

They shouldn’t have met again. Not so soon. She’s always on the verge of telling him too much. “Would you have rescued me?”

Geralt tenses. “What?”

“If you’d ridden through Vengerberg all those years ago and found me…if I’d begged you?” Yennefer smirks. “Would you have carried me away?”

He studies her a moment, frowning. “I would’ve thought,” Geralt says, “whatever life you had was better than what I could give you.”

“Mm. Most nights I slept with the pigs.”

“Yennefer.”

Gods, she thinks, how is she to tell him? It’s why she keeps coming back. It’s why she can’t bear that one day she’ll see his face for the last time—it’s why she, Yennefer of Vengerberg, is spending the night in a miserable little inn in the middle of nowhere, next to a man who hogs most of the mattress and hasn’t bathed in days, possibly weeks.

_ You see? It will possess you always. _

“It’s inside me,” she repeats. Yennefer hikes up on one elbow as well, touching a finger to a whitish scar pebbled across his bicep. “A—” a greed, an ache too long uncomforted, a hunger that will do neither of them any good, certainly not her “—nothing,” she finishes, muzzy with beer, wondering why she brought it up at all. “There’s nothing there,” Yennefer says. “That’s the problem.”

“Hm,” Geralt grunts, solid, firm, the frown slipped but, as always, never far from his face.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Maybe,” he says, then pauses, clears his throat. When Yennefer starts to cut him off Geralt shakes his head. “Don’t interrupt. Maybe—if we aren’t given what we need at birth—or if it’s taken from us—” he clears his throat again, casts around in the sheets for the demijohn they passed between themselves earlier, finds it empty beside the bed and growls. “It haunts us, Yen,” he says, turning back to her. “Maybe it never stops.”

“Maybe.” Yennefer grasps his wrist. “Are you drunk?”

“Very much,” Geralt says, his growl going low and liquid yet relieved as she draws closer and he crushes her to him. It’s so easy to lose themselves in each other, so easy to bypass hard truths and leave one another hollow. Yennefer will take the hollowness. She’ll take whatever she can get.

* * *

_ Get up. Get better. _

In the morning, she leaves first.

_ Learn.  _ And want, Yennefer thinks, with all that’s in you. For chances are the wanting is all you have.

**Author's Note:**

> Title swiped from "Her Sweet Kiss" from the soundtrack: "I'm weak, my love, and I am wanting."


End file.
